Yes, I remember that time, and that always felt extremely unethical and immoral to me. Some of the nasty popups on the web would leave you little choice, I remember there was one that would install malware regardless of you clicking cancel or closing the window. It was pretty much a takeover of your PC. Many years later a video appeared where the programmer talked about what they were doing, in a regretful way.
Nowadays I use eset ess firewall to manually block most processes from communicating. Right now, for example, I am only allowing firefox.exe to talk to the net (you can set this in the rules for the firewall).
I thought it was open - that's how cyanogenmod was able to create and distribute the android os firmware.
A good OS wouldn't let one runaway process bring down the entire OS. I learned to program at a terminal connected to a giant Unix mainframe. With a classroom full of beginner programmers all typing away at their programming homework assignment, someone would inevitably create an accidental infinite loop, or a divide by zero, or an errant pointer reference. None of these things bothered the mainframe's operating system; at worst, your individual program might hang, but never the entire computer.
Same kind of thing with the "User must learn not to click on the wrong thing" argument. On better designed operating systems, clicking on a bad email attachment won't do any damage - things aren't executable by default, as they are (were?) in Windows.
On Linux, if someone sent me a virus in a file named "bikini-beauties.exe", nothing would happen even if I was a clueless dude with more testosterone than sense, and clicked on it. I'd have to manually change the file permissions to executable - which would let me know that this wasn't an image or a text file, but a potentially dangerous program - and then click on it again to run it. I would really have to be clueless to do that.
Meantime, in Windows, any file that ended in .bat, .exe, or .scr (maybe other filename extensions too, dunno) would automatically run if you clicked on it. And Windows hides filename extensions by default, so the poor user doesn't even have a chance to realize that "bikini-beauties" is a program and not, say, a JPEG.
-Gnobuddy
True up to a point - it's certainly harder to poleaxe Linux than Windows, but far from impossible. OS protections rely on hardware functions that can be flawed too.
And linux permissions can be circumvented, again, not so easy and hackers don't try so hard as there's relatively few linux gui - ie non server - devices out there.
Linux as a cli server os is the best, but all the gui versions have flaws, or all the ones I've seen. I'd still use linux for gui based machines though, if I could. But there are far too many tools I need and use that are Win only. Which is why I keep to carefully curated specific versions of the Win 10 iso. Except for a couple of machines with no oustide connection that are still running XP - they ain't broke so I'm not fixing 'em ... One of those has been ticking away for over 5 years without a reboot.
The good thing is - there's lots of choice of free to use OS for us all!
Then there are those of us that need to use obsolete machines.
My engraver software requires a printer port dongle and an RS232 port. They will sell to me new software for a few grand.
My turret punch uses a Super Mac disc drive and the IBM PC compatible software also requires a long lost dongle. (Flood) It gets programmed in a version of machine language. Replacement cost is just under a quarter of a million.
My Audio Precision uses a PCMCIA interface. Fortunately I have two such PCs.
My engraver software requires a printer port dongle and an RS232 port. They will sell to me new software for a few grand.
My turret punch uses a Super Mac disc drive and the IBM PC compatible software also requires a long lost dongle. (Flood) It gets programmed in a version of machine language. Replacement cost is just under a quarter of a million.
My Audio Precision uses a PCMCIA interface. Fortunately I have two such PCs.
Indeed! At the moment I have only one XP machine - because of the software and the RS232 - but at the print shop we were using DOS, Windows Vista, XP, Mac OS 9, OSX and IRIX just because of legacy hardware. Very expensive hardware. It was kind of fun going back to M/S DOS and relearning it, I had 6 computers running DOS. Also a bit of good mental gymnastics jumping between all the different OSes.
Are operating systems and home computers currently at about a 1940s equivalent of the automobile industry? Good stuff being made, but none of it is particularly robust, safe or reliable.
So we have to wait about 60 years before we get an OS that doesn’t recommend a tune-up for 100,000 miles? And when they finally do, you’ll have to unsolder a BGA from the motherboard to do it.
Back in the early days, the OS (ie, critical functions) were all in ROM and couldn’t get corrupted by what somebody’s program did to the machine. Unfortunately, a “new version” was a new machine. How many “ new versions” does one actually need? If youre running an old XP machine with nothing plugged into the ethernet port and it hasn’t been rebooted in 5 years you obviously don‘t need all the latest bells and whistles. For personal preference, I’d rather change out a chip set every year or so rather than deal with the constant updates and security issues. As long as it’s not as labor-intensive as changing 16 buried spark plugs, of course.
Back in the early days, the OS (ie, critical functions) were all in ROM and couldn’t get corrupted by what somebody’s program did to the machine. Unfortunately, a “new version” was a new machine. How many “ new versions” does one actually need? If youre running an old XP machine with nothing plugged into the ethernet port and it hasn’t been rebooted in 5 years you obviously don‘t need all the latest bells and whistles. For personal preference, I’d rather change out a chip set every year or so rather than deal with the constant updates and security issues. As long as it’s not as labor-intensive as changing 16 buried spark plugs, of course.
That's why I drove my Model-T Ford for so long. Didn't want to upgrade to that fancy Model-A. Water pump?? Who needs that? 😀
I work for a financial services company. When I sign on to work in the morning it is on a Windows vm, where I read my email and have browsers to access web-based applications to admin or monitor a variety of services. My real work is on virtual terminals on a bunch of linux vm's (and even a couple of physical servers I think) where our in-house developed programs run. I spend my day at a linux command line (well, a bunch of them). We have literally tens of thousands of linux-based hosts (I think there are still some solaris boxes too) in multiple data centers around the world. My stuff runs on a couple of dozen. When I say "my stuff", I didn't code it, I am not a developer. I am in operations, and unix sysadmin skills are my most important asset.
I used to keep a Linux system at home, but over time I ceased to see the point. Maybe someday I will get back to it. My home PC is for email and web browsing, and as a launch pad to connect to work. Windows works OK and is supported by the apps I use. (Though the "upgrade" from Win7 to Win10 was a horror show.)
Yesterday I had to add ubuntu to a windows system... WSL2 works quite well, and it installed easily enough - except for downloading the linux image. You're supposed to do that via MS Store, but I had to dig out the direct download info - MS store amazes me, given how important it should be to MS it's the most broken bit of code I've seen in years!
Once done though it runs fine, much quicker and simpler than installing vmware or other virtual machine system.
Once done though it runs fine, much quicker and simpler than installing vmware or other virtual machine system.
I try to avoid installing apps via the MS store because when the apps are installed, the files are placed into a specially protected folder (WindowsApps). If you need to alter any of the files, for example to add a plugin directly to a folder, even God himself does not have permission to do it. There are workarounds, but they can sometimes render the app inoperable afterwards.
I spent ages trying to add a plugin to Inkscape and even with full admin rights and taking ownership etc. it was not possible. In the end I installed the standalone .MSI and the job was done within a minute.
I spent ages trying to add a plugin to Inkscape and even with full admin rights and taking ownership etc. it was not possible. In the end I installed the standalone .MSI and the job was done within a minute.
For those of you who use Windows: Do they finally have software repos yet?
Yesterday I wanted to install LTspice...
I opened a terminal and typed
and entered my password. That's it. LTSpice is now installed and working. No website to go to or hoops to jump through 🙂 It just works.
Yesterday I wanted to install LTspice...
I opened a terminal and typed
Code:
yay -S ltspiceThat only works in a limited way on linux - the software has to be free, and in a listed repo setup on your system.
I frequently have to install stuff by going to a web page - often github - downloading then installing, and then sometimes hunting down additional dependencies, finding correct versions and faffing with permissions. So the intsall experience can be good or bad in win or linux...
I frequently have to install stuff by going to a web page - often github - downloading then installing, and then sometimes hunting down additional dependencies, finding correct versions and faffing with permissions. So the intsall experience can be good or bad in win or linux...
In that case
And you'll find if you use an Arch based distro line Manjaro and enable AUR, almost anything you want can be found through the package manager.
Instead of hitting github etc to check out audacity or downloading a tarball, I just type
for instance... And since the code is broken at the moment, I run Audacity from a .AppImage file.
It also doesn't have to be free or free of charge. You can install Reaper from AUR - (reaper-bin) but you still need a licence to unlock the full version though of course.
Code:
git clone ...Instead of hitting github etc to check out audacity or downloading a tarball, I just type
Code:
yay -S audacity-gitIt also doesn't have to be free or free of charge. You can install Reaper from AUR - (reaper-bin) but you still need a licence to unlock the full version though of course.